The Grace Kelly Dress Book Club Guide
The Reading with Renee March Book Club Pick
The #ReadWithBookClubbish May Book Club Pick
Thank you for choosing The Grace Kelly Dress for your book club discussion!
I hope you will enjoy this page that contains curated content for your book club meeting. You'll find Brenda’s essay about the inspiration behind the book, along with tons of fun links about the book and the process of writing it.
Read Brenda’s essay about her inspiration for the story.
Discussion questions for your Book Club meeting.
Want to read an exclusive excerpt of The Grace Kelly Dress? PopSugar has got it here!
FOR YOUR BOOK CLUB MEETING: MINI VANILLA CAKE
One of the best parts of planning a wedding is the cake tasting. Are you like Rocky with a love for plain, ahem, vanilla cake? Give yourself your own tasting at home with this perfectly petite vanilla cake!
Ingredients
For the cake:
6 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tbsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/8 tsp fine salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
6 tbsp whole milk
1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar
For the vanilla buttercream:
8 tbsp (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups powdered sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp heavy cream
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350°F, and spray a 6″ round cake pan with 2″ sides with cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pan with a round of parchment paper.
In a medium-size bowl, beat together the butter and sugar with an electric mixer. Beat very well, about 1-2 minutes.
Add the egg and vanilla, and beat until well-combined, about 15 seconds.
In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, salt and baking soda. Add half of the mixture to the batter and beat for just a few seconds before stirring in half of the milk and vinegar. Continue beating. Add the remaining dry ingredients and beat, and then stir in the remaining milk.
Scrape the batter into the prepared pan, smooth out the top, and bake on a small sheet pan for 37-39 minutes, until a cake tester or toothpick comes out clean.
Let the cake cool on a wire rack in the pan. Carefully remove it from the pan, pulling away the parchment paper once it has cooled.
To make the buttercream, beat the butter in a medium-size bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the powdered sugar, vanilla and heavy cream, and beat until light and fluffy. If the mixture seems too stiff, add a splash more heavy cream.
Use a little more than half of the buttercream to frost the cake. If you made the cake ahead of time and frozen it, it’s best to apply a crumb coat of buttercream before applying a second layer.
Place the remaining 1/4 of the buttercream in a piping bag fitted with a 1M tip, and pipe roses along the outside edge of the cake. To make a rose, pipe a spiral shape, starting inside of moving around the center.
Recipe courtesy of Dessert for Two.
What your favorite authors are saying about The Grace Kelly Dress:
“The Grace Kelly Dress is exactly the type of book I love: charming, smart, and brimming with heart. You won’t be able to put down this story of three generations of women and the fit-for-a-princess dress that binds them. This is Brenda’s best book yet!”
“One of my favorite writers, Brenda Janowitz writes with extraordinary humor and heart, her writing growing in beauty and maturity with every book. This is a book that has to be added to your nightstand immediately.”
“Brenda Janowitz’s gift is understanding and revealing the nuances of complicated families, of love embraced, love lost and love reclaimed. With The Grace Kelly Dress she has stitched together a seamless intergenerational modern-day fairy tale, with a very contemporary twist”
